


Evil is a relay sport

by fluorescentgrey



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Graphic Depictions of Illness, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Canon, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23902951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Was it wishful to consider this man changed? Chagrined? Humbled by a rejection that seemed pretty damn final and the resulting scurvid slog across the barrenlands? Probably. But damn if it wouldn't be a hell of a lot easier to be puppetmastered by him again.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 23
Kudos: 64





	Evil is a relay sport

The first time they saw a tree, the first tree Solomon had seen in more than three years, he instantly started crying. There was hardly any of it left, but there was hardly any of them left either. The wind and the ice had shredded it into oblivion. You couldn’t cry for very long up here, because the tears froze instantly on your face, and, indeed, after a few moments, the person he had known for several years as Hickey, and in recent months as Cornelius, and now as nothing at all, handed him a scrap of filthy fabric from the inside pocket of the navy greatcoat. There was a bit of old and familiar amused judgement in his eye as he watched Solomon scrape the frost away from his ravaged face, and Solomon dared to consider for a moment that soon it might be able to be like it had been before. Then it was gone as quickly as it had come. It went under the ice, and he followed Sol again, like a sleepwalker. 

In two days’ time, amid the thin trees propped like toothpicks into the barrenlands, the lichen, the wind, the green, god, the green, the green, he shot a caribou calf, and they ate everything they could off the bone raw and steaming, like cavemen of ancient times, kneeling in the melting snow in an ecstasy of bright blood. Afterward they lay on their backs by the warmth of the carcass staring at the sky, and Sol counted to fifty, and then figured that another fifty wouldn’t hurt, and then he got up, packed as much of the rest of the meat as would fit in his knapsack, scraped the fat from inside the pelt, as he and his brother had done back home in Liverpool, as children, with squirrels and rats and once, a badger, playing Celts and Romans. He gave the fur to Hickey. It was easiest to think of him by this name even after everything. “We have to move,” he said. He tried to put all the commanding force of his former rank into his voice, which would barely hold it, like a bucket punched through with holes. Not that this person had ever paid any mind to any force to his voice nor any rank to his name. But one had to be clinging to scraps, now. “The wolves’ll be along.” 

The sun circled them all day and night and only relented for a few moments in which it hovered spreading at the horizon like an egg yolk. Sol woke up out of bad dreams, tasting blood. He went to the edge of their camp and spat out a tooth. He stared at his own reflection in the still blue-black water until he couldn’t stand it anymore and dropped a stone to break the vision into ripples — face craggy and tattooed red and black with frostbite, scurvid blood marked over blue and bloodless lips. Eyes sunken, hair and beard wild and thin, rimed with filthy salt and blood. Skin and bones and ghostly bruises inside the ragged clothing. 

The lakes were like sheets of sheer blue glass. Something about this place made the earth so porous and scarred that they were obliged to wander aimlessly within an endless maze of rock and water. They crouched in the slipping shale at the lakeshore and drank deep. Sol emptied one of the supposed veal and tomato tins he carried in the pack and rinsed it out so that they might heat water on the fire to clean their hair and faces and reachable wounds. He looked at the map for a while like he knew what he was doing. After a moment Hickey reached over him and tapped the pale index finger of his good hand, the shred of the nail rimed deeply with blood, against the speck at the base of the Great Slave Lake that was the nearest facsimile of European civilization — Fort Resolution. 

“I bloody know,” Sol said. “The trouble is where we are now.” 

Hickey’s eyes flicked up and his brow did one of its fanciful contortions. Sol refused to look. Hickey opened his hand so that his thumb was against the speck of the voyageur post, and his smallest finger nearly reached the narrowest winnowing of the mouth of the Back River. 

Between, a span of brutal, unmapped nothingness. Here be dragons. Nevertheless, Sol began to fear that perhaps they might live.

\--

The human spirit is indomitable. He kept telling himself that over and over and eventually he realized he was saying it aloud. It was simply impossible that they could still be walking, and yet they were. They lay down for a few hours when the sky was darkest and then they walked again. He could feel the scurvy in his knees, like ants on a dropped candy. It was in his teeth so that it hurt to chew and it was in his fingers so it hurt to close a fist. Hickey wouldn’t take off the greatcoat which proved to Sol that it was in the not-so-old wounds across his backside, opening them up again, like they had just been made. They had healed remarkably well, Sol had observed not unrecently, but it didn’t do to be thinking about his arse now. He didn’t think he could get it up if he tried, and anyway, a lot had changed in the interim. Sol wondered about what was left of his tongue. 

They walked. In the great maze of low, sharp green heather and slate and the silent mirrory lakes the sun was very bright and his voice sounded very loud. “It was this or the railyards,” he said. Then he said it again, because he wasn’t sure if Hickey had heard him. “It was the Marines or the railyards. I thought, I’ll not lose half my fingers by the time I’m thirty. All the wars are over. What harm can there bloody be? God, I was a child. I hadn’t lived. Funny to think about ever having been such a bloody idiot. But that bloody idiot put me here. He’s with me still, god damn him.” 

He heard Hickey’s suffering footsteps behind him on the loose shale, stopped, turned. Hickey stopped and watched him warily. The clear, light eyes filtered contempt, pity, fear. God damn you, Sol thought, go on, lead us, I know it’s in there, it can’t all have left you at once.

“Are you listening to me,” he said instead.

It was like talking to the ice. Wind came back. Otherwise like talking to Billy Heather had been near the end, when Sol had suspected he resented being kept alive, and yet continued to cut his fingernails and feed him tinned soup and grog.

They went on.

“Your accent’s Yorkshire,” he said. “Or it was. When you talked. You know, I know nothing about you at all?”

He had thought a lot about it, once, lying awake in his tiny berth, or in the sailcloth tent, in the endless wind, thinking that Hickey must have been a molly-house boy back in London, or otherwise perhaps he had been in prison. He had fixated on the first option painfully often during the long night, shivering in the thin wool blankets, thinking about Hickey as some kind of painted whore, trying to think about literally anything else but unable to chase the image from his mind, stripping his dick raw with a cold fist. Whatever he had been, this man was pathologically adaptable. If he had a fixed self, it was somewhere Sol couldn’t see it. Perhaps it was here now, or else this was another mask. 

“You probably would have done anything to get out of there,” Sol said. “I know. I know you.”

This was perhaps a little wishful. After all he didn’t know this person’s name.

“I would’ve done anything to get out of Merseyside,” he admitted. “A bit of a monkey’s paw, this. I suppose nobody could’ve foretold it would end up as such. Not even the captain.” 

Behind him, Hickey snorted. This was one of an extremely select vocabulary of sounds he could produce now without a tongue. 

“Likely nobody foresaw the demon bear,” Sol qualified. 

“Hm,” said Hickey. 

“Ah,” said Sol. “So you did, you foresaw it?” 

Every damn question could be rhetorical if the person you were talking to couldn’t speak, and you refused to look at them — couldn’t look at them, because you had to lead, even though you had no idea where you were going, because the entire water-maze world looked like some kind of purgatorial wallpaper, rolled out unto infinity under the wild wind, the sun’s bright white eye. Because your brain was a mess, and the constant pain was like a thin smoke rising always into your vision, or a low, tart ringing in the ears. 

“Your bloody bear,” Sol said, shaking his head. “You know, I might feel for you, really I might, if you hadn’t used all of us as bait.” 

He hadn’t actually seen what had happened. He’d woken up and Hickey had been knelt over him and his mouth was full of blood and he was holding his right hand to his chest because it was badly mangled, like some of the women you saw back home who had been working in cotton mills since they were girls. Like it had gotten pulled into some horrible machinery and been chewed up and spat out again. Relief, unmistakable, flashed over the drawn, filthy face, surfacing out from beneath the pain, like a bright light in dark water, and then it went away again, as quickly as it had come. 

Sometimes Sol replayed this vision on the edge of sleep. One had to be clinging to scraps now. 

They walked. “Can you eat?” he said. Hickey just looked at him. Sometimes he seemed not to really see anything. Every few minutes, Sol checked behind to make sure he was following, and sometimes he was far away, across the shale, like he had stopped still in his tracks, but as soon as Sol started walking back to get him he started going again. 

His head was pounding. He could feel his own heartbeat in every single bone in his skull. It had been hard to corral his thoughts for quite some time now; if assorted mutinous protestations were to be believed, this was likely the fault of whatever was wrong with their provisions. Eating each other had likely just served to compound the effects. Getting embroiled in this manipulative affair in the first place probably hadn't helped much either, and getting rammed in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle hadn’t been a boon. To wit, sometimes, at first, when he stopped hearing the footsteps behind him, part of him, a large part of him, would start singing in his ear, _Keep going. Don’t look back, keep going, keep going. What has he ever done for you besides scramble your brain like an egg? Besides, without a tongue, he’s likely not half as good at sucking dick anymore._

He turned around. Every time. It was a test, he understood. 

If he thought about it all too hard, he wondered why he had ever tried to pass that test in the first place. But what could be done about it now? “You really thought the captain was your only equal on this expedition?” he mused. “The captain is brilliant — the captain will live. _You_ wrongly estimated _Mr. Goodsir_.” 

“Mm-mm,” said Hickey. 

Sol whirled on him, which made his head spin. Hickey was just behind him and watched him wobble in his disintegrating boots with an infuriating blank amusement. “You really thought that man would kill himself to feed us? After everything he said to you?”

Hickey shook his head. He opened his mouth and made that horrible gargling noise around the stump of his tongue and the blackish blood in which his teeth and gums stagnated. At first he had tried this quite often, as though eventually he would do it and find he could miraculously speak again. It infuriated him and disgusted Sol, not least because he had kissed that mouth, and that mouth had been on his dick, and, once, memorably, on his asshole, et cetera, and now it was a kind of gaping wound, seeping abject offal. Else, it had taken on its figurative comportment in the physical world. Only death was in there, as anyone might have seen from the beginning. 

At last Hickey reached for Sol’s wrist — he startled, just to be touched; his skin felt loose and sore; he knew the scurvy would print bruises in the shape of Hickey’s grip by supper — and opened the suffering cup of Sol’s hand with his fingers. With the pointer, carefully, like a schoolmarm, watching Sol’s face, he drew the letters against Sol's palm: _DOCTOR GOODSIR_. 

\--

In London, Sol had paid for it a few times with the girls who hung around Covent Garden, and back home in Liverpool he had lost his virginity to a neighbor girl with consumption who everybody knew gave it away for free just to feel something. It was fair to say he understood what the fuss was about when it came to the mysteries of Eros. What had happened over the past several months had thrown a bit of a wrench in his self-conception, yes, but it was classifiable with a whole lot of other various and sundry points under an as-yet-uncertain heading, including the mental scrambling, the demon bear, the cannibalism, the ice gasping and moaning like a dying man as it crushed the ships, the light overhead in the endless night twisting and writhing like a box of snakes, witnessing the devouring of a man’s soul, seeing the jelly pudding brain through the cracked-open skull of his best friend, watching this man dragged from his arms beneath a human tide of flame and flesh and drowned, watching men lashed for a valiant deed, watching one among these men lashed as a boy and being overwhelmed by a sudden and inexplicable feverishness… 

When he could, when the tide sucked far out under the new moon, he remembered putting the tobacco in Hickey’s hammock, and he had wondered if he had brought this whole thing upon himself with what had seemed then to be just another of the sort of gestures of kindness men make toward one another in desperation. He had felt badly. He had meant just that. Before that long night was over it had been vexed to nightmare by paranoia, isolation, loneliness, fear, desperation, hunger, et cetera, et cetera. Excuses, anyway. His hands were so rough and dry from the cold, insensate here and there from years of compounding frostbite, that sometimes he was overwhelmed by the smoothness of porcelain, or the light fabric of his carnival costume. Touching another person’s skin — just the underside of Hickey’s wrist, at first, which was incredibly soft — was blindsiding and thoroughly disastrous. 

They went down together into the hold, where it was frigid cold, but somehow uncomfortably warm, all at once. But for the scars across Hickey’s arse, which were thick and pink and shining, ridged, almost warm to the touch, he might have been a woman, with the narrow waist and the smooth spine that surfaced from the fine skin, like a rope pulled taught, coming visible from beneath the snow. 

Afterward, Hickey fixed his hair and beard with the tin of grease in his pocket — little better than tallow, but not without a minty air, like a single green thread in plain fabric — which he also used for fucking. He was practiced enough to do it blind. If he knew Sol was awake and watching he didn’t show it. His face was still and drawn about the mouth, worried, older, and the eyes moved quickly, and he worried his lip with his teeth, watching into the darkness toward the door to the hold where they kept the dead and all their accompanying rats. 

He had his hair go, these days, along with every last vestige of vanity, except for when he pushed it out of his face with his ever-trembling hand, and watched intently at the horizon, as though they had not killed that thing, as though it were still following them. 

They walked on. It seemed insane to think of sex now, as it seemed insane to think of home, music, a pub roast and a pint of ale, a new uniform, the railroad, a haircut. He had never been much for church, but he thought he knew how Adam felt — dragging his destroyed body through the never-ending wasteland — except that the place they had left had hardly been Eden. And he would have killed for an apple. 

They stopped and ate some of the caribou meat they had been carrying. It was beginning to spoil, so they left the rest for the scavengers Sol knew were no doubt following them, waiting until they dropped. 

They walked on. “I have a tally of you, you know,” Sol said, eventually. The sun was low and dark, like the hour before sunset at home in the summer, except he knew it was close to midnight. “I know you well.” 

He waited for Hickey to make one of those disbelieving sounds. It suited him that just about every sound he could make now was a disbelieving sound. But he only heard the footfalls on the slate behind him. 

“I know you well,” Sol went on. “I know your game. I’ve seen it played long enough now, and I won’t play it anymore.” 

He had intended to stop there. Why did this keep happening? 

“I know how you… used me. It seems quite obvious now, doesn’t it. Like anybody in their right mind might have noticed. Except we weren’t in our right minds, were we? Except maybe for you, god damn it. I wonder if I hadn’t — I had too much pride even to admit to myself that I was — ” 

His mind produced an image of some duchess walking a well-coiffed poodle on a leather cord. Neptune, the Newfoundland, sitting attentively at their table in the hold to beg. Come. Fetch. Sit. Stay. 

“As soon as I was afraid, I saw you didn’t need me anymore. I saw. God. My heart — I would’ve done just about — but then, now we’re here. So. Fuck you. God. Do you feel anything? Love? It must be so — empty inside your head. You must be such a lonely man.” 

Behind him, he heard Hickey’s deep, shaky breath. He stopped, turned. They were on uneven enough ground to look one another nearly eye to eye. Hickey made a gesture with his good hand: _Go on, then. Don’t quit while you’re ahead._

Sol could nearly hear his voice. But there was nothing more to say. He turned again toward the endless horizon. 

\--

Fort Resolution was the oldest and northernmost trading post in what was then called the North-Western Territory, to distinguish this region from the part of British North America owned at the time by the Hudson's Bay Company for the purposes of the hunting and trapping and selling of furs. Such a distinguishment was clear only half a world away and perhaps on paper, because the tightly interwoven nameless waterways of the northlands were lousier with voyageurs each mile further south they made it. Sol began to worry about the workability of the going plan when he tried to wave down a _canot du nord_ on the deep black scar their chart called Artillery Lake and the paddlers, at the sight of them, their ragged clothes, their torn faces, their squalid camp, just kept fucking paddling. 

Sol kicked a tin into the water and shouted after them but it just sounded like the doomed roar of a dying animal. He turned to Hickey, who shrugged, having not arisen from where he sat near the embers of the fire. He passed the curled talon of his destroyed hand up and down his own chest and then toward Sol, trying to say something like, _Have you seen us?_

“We're men same as them.” 

Hickey's brow and the blue-black lips twitched upward, as though pulled by a string. The ghoulishness of such an expression was its own mocking explanation.

“Bloody French,” Sol said. “Superstitious and inhospitable.” 

They walked on, even though, Sol understood now, there was no guarantee of their being received at Fort Resolution. There, perhaps, if they were even let in the door, they would be asked to explain their sorry condition. Solomon Tozer was a Royal Marine of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, but who even knew who or what Hickey was? There remained the unflattering facts that they had participated in mutiny and cannibalism, among other offenses. There remained the fact that Hickey had cut out his own tongue and let that awful something eat it out of his hand. And, because of this, there remained the sorriest fact of all, which was that Sol was going to have to tell whatever tale had better be good enough to save both their lives. 

It weighed on him heavy. He might have otherwise noticed it was a staggeringly beautiful place. When they stopped to eat or rest he saw Hickey noticing, his eyes shifting and bouncing like flies on shit, smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, surveying the sheer rock cliffs and the bright water and the endless sky, the ragged trees painted in vivid green, the scrapes of red-gold lichen over the endless barren rock, all of it with the delight of a child, even as Sol drew the bloody tins from his pack again, again, again. 

\--

They built a primitive camp in the low woods, not far from the trading post, but distant enough from the roads and the waterways to avoid being seen. There was a lean-to of sawn logs draped with old sailcloth and brush under which they slept curled together against the evening chill in their filthy woolen bedrolls, and a firepit hewn into the cold, stony ground with a wedge of slate. 

On the last miles of their long walk, the paranoia had nearly consumed Sol whole, such that, for days now, he could not quite seem to stop shaking. Against all odds they had made it to their only hope for survival, and now he was petrified to so much as set foot there. He woke on a cold morning, soaked in dew, chilled to the bone, to find Hickey crouching by the embers of the cookfire, staring at him intently. When he saw Sol was awake he raised his good hand and pointed adamantly west, toward the fort. 

Sol had to clear his throat twice before his voice worked. “You want to go there? What story are you going to tell them?” 

Hickey opened his mouth to show Sol the blood and grist inside, as though Sol had forgotten. 

“That’s right. If you could talk, I’ve no doubt you could tell them a story that wouldn't end in our bloody court martial. But, by your own hand, by your own hubris, you can’t speak, so here we are. What do you want me to do about it?” 

Hickey pointed at Sol, then he pointed west again. 

“I’m not bloody going,” Sol said. “I can’t. We’ll hack it. I don’t know. We’ll hack it.” 

Hickey got up and walked into the woods. Sol wouldn’t’ve put it past him to march into Fort Resolution and collapse to the his knees on ground making the horrible gargling slate-scraping screaming sound around what was left of his tongue just to find out where that might take him. He fell back asleep into evil dreams. When he woke up again a few hours later Hickey was back by the embers, trying to rub feeling into his broken hand. 

To say they were shells of their former selves was an insult to shells. The man with the silverest tongue that had ever been, now with no tongue at all. A marine who couldn’t close a fist to throw a punch. Five bullets left for the rifle. 

They lived like animals. They lived like rats in the holds of the old ships or worse. Certain people Sol had known in his life, including and perhaps especially one Lieutenant John Irving, might have said they were due this punishment by god for sodomy, mutiny, and cannibalism, among, no doubt, other offenses. That they lived at all was too much for Sol, who might rather have been dead, but could not bring himself to do it, not wanting to hazard a guess at what suicide might do to the compendium of sins, and not enough for Hickey, who had always, as far as Sol knew, peered longingly into windows above his station in this world like some kind of demonic Little Match Girl. They ate whatever they found and were sick sometimes but never mortally, leaning together over the squalid latrine, taking turns puking or shitting their guts out. They ate bitter berries and strange white tubers and seaweed and fish and caribou, boiling the bones of a wolf's kill they'd found to eke out the liquid marrow, but for some reason could never seem to shake the scurvy, which covered them in purple and black bruises and lesions like lepers. One morning Sol went alone to the shore of the lake and took his boots and socks off for the first time perhaps in months only to find the fabric and the leather full of pus and blood because a wound he had suffered stepping on a nail as a child in Liverpool had burst open again, entirely without his noticing. 

Time marched its death march ever onward. The end of the summer began to haunt them like some ghostly revenant. The days began once more to shorten so that there was some true darkness in the sky when they lay their heads down in attempt to quiet their aching bodies enough to rest. One morning, before dawn, Sol stole some wool blankets from a voyageur camp on the Little Buffalo River, and he overheard the traders speaking, as they packed the _canots,_ about a white man traveling with a group of Inuit. 

\--

A small group of Netsilik people had come to trade at the fort, and had set up camp on the banks of the silt-brown Slave River to the northwest of town. They had built their skin tents rather than the ice houses they constructed in the far north and the pelts shifted in the stiff breeze. Sol watched from the brush, waiting, not knowing exactly what he was waiting for, until the breeze got to him. The breeze smelled like winter and a sickly old fear put a knife of ice through his breast at the thought of it. It was worse than the fear of being seen like this or the fear of the captain, so he stepped into the clearing, trying to summon a modicum of confidence and a general air of normalcy, as if decaying human wreckage traipsed into Indian camps in the barrenlands all the time. 

A few of the elders were gathered around the vessels they used to ferment fish, and they rose at the sight of him. It had been so long since Sol had seen another human being besides Hickey that he was struck by how hale they looked. 

“Crozier,” Sol tried. His voice broke in his throat, like just-blown glass. “Is Captain Crozier with you?” 

The elders spoke quietly among themselves. Perhaps wisely, they were keeping their safe distance. “Aglooka,” one of them said at last, gesturing to the smallest skin tent. 

Sol went. His heart was in his throat. There was nothing to knock on, so he just said, “Captain?” 

There was a silence. Then, as though this were only the door to the stern wardroom on Terror, the captain said, “Come.” 

The tent was dark inside. Crozier was sitting by a low bowl of burning tallow, clad in furs, painstakingly sharpening what looked like a slate arrowhead. He looked up at the light from the door and they studied each other for a long moment in which Sol clasped his hands behind his back to keep from raising his right to his forehead. 

“You shouldn’t be here, Sergeant Tozer,” said the captain. 

His voice and eyes were tired, dead tired, and there was a scar at his throat that Sol could just make out beneath the collar of the furs, and he was missing his right hand entirely. The stump was bound in fabric to keep it from the cold. 

“May I sit down,” Sol said, “sir.” 

The captain gestured. When Sol did, his knees and hips and ankles cracked like gunshots. The captain studied him. He seemed to be weighing options for what he might do. For a moment it was silent but for the wind, and, from outside, whispers in Inuktitut. 

“Eat this,” the captain said at last, passing a bowl across the tallow flame. The bowl was made of sealskin that had been carefully shaped and cured, and it contained a handful of evenly cut chunks of some gray-white material, and a lump of something purplish that looked like powdered paint. 

“What is it?” 

The captain indicated with his surviving index finger: “This is _maktaaq_ — whaleskin. And this is _agutak_. Berries whipped with fat.” 

“Fat?” 

“Yes, fat, Solomon, which you desperately need, if you want to live up here.” 

It did not look like anything that should be called food. Sol picked up a piece of the whaleskin — between his fingers it felt like a bit of sponge — and sniffed it. It had almost no odor but for a bit of brine, down deep, like brackish water, and it was cold to touch, like a corpse. 

“Get over yourself and eat,” Crozier said. 

This was a test. Sol was, of late, in the business of passing tests. He put in his mouth and chewed and swallowed. It was not the most horrible thing he had eaten in the last months. He took another piece and used the edge of it to scoop up a lump of berries, which were also not as objectionable as he had expected. He had had these berries before — they were a bright black, and grew close to the ground on a juniper-type bush — but these were riper than the ones around his and Hickey’s camp and the fat had drawn out their sweetness. 

“Is our mutual friend with you,” the captain asked, knowing the answer. Evenly, befitting a man of his consequence, the way he had once inquired after the well-being of the marines and the status of the stores of rifles and ammunition. 

Sol looked up, hovering greasy fingers over the bowl. “I think you know the answer to that, sir.” 

The captain nodded, contemplatively. Sol had eaten about half the contents of the bowl and it was like a single drop in the great empty barrel, the roaring, devouring maw inside him, but he passed it back across the fire toward the captain anyway. 

“I don’t suppose I can convince you to come with us,” Crozier said. “You’ll be well taken care of in our band. You can get your strength back up enough to live another winter.” 

“I can’t leave him,” Sol said. He was shocked to hear it come out of his own mouth, as though it had been tugged out of him hand over hand, as though it had been cut out, like his tongue, even as he knew it was true. “He’ll die.”

“Better man have,” said the captain. “In fact, to the best of my knowledge, it is down to the three of us.” 

Three of them left out of one hundred and twenty nine. Three: Crozier, Sol, and Hickey. The black sheep of the Discovery Service, a Royal Marine seduced to mutiny and darkest sin, and the seducer himself, a caulker’s mate, an imposter. A motlier crew perhaps never having been assembled on this earth or any other. 

“Three of us,” Sol repeated. 

“We walked through their last camps,” the captain said. “We should all be thankful we were not among them.” 

Sol hung his head. “Yes, sir,” he said. He would think of himself alongside the captain later — he, too, had lost all his men. Not an equivalent disaster in number but certainly in percentage. 

“Forgive me my bluntness, Sergeant,” said Crozier, “but what the fuck are you doing here.” 

In order to do what needed to be done, he had to swallow every last drop of pride. It went down worse than anything he had heretofore managed to swallow in the name of living: scavenged grist, bone marrow, kelp, lichen, moldy fruit, human flesh. “It pains me to have to ask you, sir,” he said. “I can’t — we can’t go on like this any longer.” 

“I’ve invited you to join us, Solomon,” the captain said. He had let that fatherly note shift into his voice and it reached into Sol’s heart and plucked one of the remaining cords strung up in the hollow cavern. “That invitation stands. I don't see what the trouble is.” 

“I — I only need to know how.” 

“How what?” 

Sol looked up. He met the captain’s eyes. “What do they eat to keep the scurvy off?” 

The captain cocked his pale brow. He waited to hear whatever was next. 

“I can’t chase it off,” Sol confessed. “Everything’s falling apart. I feel like a walking corpse. I slough a little bit of myself off whenever I move. Every terrible thing that's ever happened to me has come back. I can’t sleep for the pain. Can’t keep nothing in my stomach. I think I might prefer to be dead. Unfortunately I can't quite seem to stop living.” 

The captain studied him. “Poetic,” he said. “Isn't it?” 

“Sir?” 

“You can't get seal down here,” the captain told him. “Not regularly. You can make the trip back to the ice in the summer to hunt or trade. If you can get a seal, eat all of it — the blubber, the skin, the brain. Eat it all raw. If you can decant the blood, drink it. I'm not done,” he said, when Sol protested. “The berries will help. Do them with fat like these. And liver — caribou, deer, oxen. Eat that raw too. It won't kill you, Solomon, and besides I know for a fact you've eaten worse.” 

“I don’t have — there’s three bullets left, for the rifle — ” 

“Look all around you,” the captain said. “Use everything you see. For god’s sake, you’ve got to stop thinking like a bloody Englishman.” 

“But — ” 

“Let it all go behind you, Solomon,” the captain said. “You’re not going home again. The sooner you accept it, the easier it will be.” 

It felt like the concealing cloth had been torn off a truth he’d already known, but nevertheless he put the heels of his hands in his eyes to keep from weeping. 

“I can give you _maktaaq_ in trade,” the captain went on. “As much as you can carry. All we have to spare, I'm afraid, but it'll help.”

Sol looked up. God help him, his voice was ragged and broken. “Trade for — I, we don't have anything.” 

Crozier considered, or he pretended to consider. At last he said, “I want James’s boots.”

“James’s — ”

“Commander Fitzjames’ boots. Mr. Hickey has them.”

Of course he did. They were in pieces now, but he still wore them. Like the greatcoat, Sol knew he would wear them until they disintegrated, as tokens, or perhaps as trophies. 

“I’ll get them,” Sol said. “I swear on my life. I’ll get them.” 

The corner of the captain's mouth turned up. Not quite a smile. “On your life,” he said. 

“Yes, sir.” 

“That’s quite a promise.” 

Before he could think twice about it, Sol reached across the tallow fire and shook the captain’s hand. 

\--

On the day that he and John Morfin found the heads of Lieutenant Fairholme’s would-be rescue party in the pressure ridges off King William Island, Sol found Hickey in camp, around the back of the medical tent, pacing, listening, as he was wont to do. Sol gestured for him, and they walked out together into the slate and fog. Even starved, like this, there was a bright, curious beauty about Hickey, like a fox evading hunters in the snow. By this time Sol had forgotten himself, as he tended to think about it then, maybe twice, maybe three times. The great mystery had fiddled with his memory and blurred it all into a swath of lanternlight and flesh. Sometimes in the great storm of hail and St. Elmo’s Fire tearing his mind to pieces this man was the only thing that made sense. The only being of fixed form. The only person Sol could be sure was as alive as he was alive. It was something about the conviction, or otherwise that Sol had never met anybody so smart who wasn’t gentry. These days, when he couldn’t sleep, or when he thought couldn’t haul any longer, he thought of a fraction of a second the first time they had slept together, the overwhelmed kind of too-much sound Hickey had made, and Sol had stopped, halfway inside him, clutching his waist and panting like a teenager, until Hickey reached back and slapped his thigh and said, get a bloody move on. But that sound was the only time he had ever heard or felt Hickey admit weakness, and he himself had done it. It had not even been like that in the lashing.

In the fog, he thought about late nights in London and the mollies in the alleys kissing and groping and arguing, and he badly wanted to go home, where all of this would be over. “What is it,” said Hickey. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I bloody have.”

He hugged himself. Of course he did, how could he not? it had been decided since the moment it happened: He broke his word to the captain and told Hickey about the heads on the ice.

He watched Hickey think. The light eyes were like seaglass — like a window through which some distorted image of reality might be seen. He did not expect what happened next, which was that Hickey stepped in close and stood on tiptoe and wrapped his arms around him.

Sol had smelled him and felt him before, the sticky smooth skin in the crook of his neck and his heartbeat, which was quick and jaunty, like a dance played on a pipe and fiddle, clever, always moving. He was narrow and thin but strong and he smelled like the grease he put in his hair and tobacco and mint. The fine-boned hand best suited to wielding the bone knife he certainly carried somewhere secret on his person even now filtered Sol’s hair at the back of his skull gently as his mother soothing a fever and the lips and voice were at his ear. “I need you to be strong,” Hickey said. “I need you.” 

It had been years since Sol had been embraced at all. Hickey swayed in his boots, rocking them together, as though there were some music on the breeze that only he could hear. Sol closed his eyes. He imagined he was on a ship under sail, and that they were going home. Finally, Hickey spoke again, so softly and gently that Sol couldn't tell at first that it was a question he was meant to answer. “How long do you think this fog will hold?” 

\--

Was it wishful to consider this man changed? Chagrined? Humbled by a rejection that seemed pretty damn final and the resulting scurvid slog across the barrenlands? Probably. But damn if it wouldn't be a hell of a lot easier to be puppetmastered by him again. 

At their camp, Hickey was absently poking the fire with a stick. He seemed to not even see Sol until he sat beside him, set the captain’s skin bag of _maktaaq_ between them, and set about warming his hands. It was darkish, and the sky was like a bruise, and the insides of Sol’s bones hurt. Fittingly, Hickey elbowed him hard in the side. 

“Jesus. What?” 

He pointed down at the bag with his good hand. The question on his face was somehow already accusatory. 

“I went to see the captain,” Sol said. “He wants your boots.” 

He had not seen this look on Hickey’s face since their camp on the edge of the ice, when he had passed up a cigarette. Drawn, betrayed, mutinous. Horribly unsurprised. 

“Before you hit me over the head again, I’ve probably saved both our lives, so you know.” He tried to remember what Crozier had told him. It had all sounded right coming from somebody like the captain. “We can’t very well pretend to be Englishmen anymore. That’s the crux of it. If we want to live, which I do, damn you. I do.” 

Hickey made that terrible gargling noise. He couldn’t have been trying to say anything — he knew he couldn’t speak. It was just that he also knew that Sol couldn’t stand it. 

“For Christ’s sake, stop that. What would you have me do? I’m not you — I’m not anything like you. Thank god for that.” He steeled himself. He wondered where Hickey was keeping his knife these days. “If it weren’t for you we would be dead and happy by now,” he said. “Give me the fucking boots.” 

Hickey put the heels of his hands in his eyes. The bad one was a mess of black, like the mangled soot-stained hand of a coal digger. He shouldn’t have been alive with that thing, but he was. All he could do was shake his head.

“You can’t bear to be parted with them?” Sol said. He couldn't keep the jeering tone out of his voice. “They’re in pieces. What does it bloody matter? It's all symbols, it's nothing real anymore, and — ”

Hickey looked over toward Sol and shook his head, raw and desperate. _Not that_ , Sol could nearly hear him say. The worst part was, it was impossible to tell if he was still being manipulated, but it hurt anyway. Sol wouldn’t look away. He couldn’t. He needed an answer. 

At last Hickey reached for Sol’s wrist with surprising gentleness. He propped Sol’s hand against his knee and held the fingers open with the wrist belonging to his bad hand. With his good hand, slowly, quite carefully, watching Sol’s face to make sure he understood, he wrote the following, with Sol repeating each word aloud back to him once it had been written: 

_I TOLD IT WE WANTED TO LIVE._

Sol blinked. “It died,” he said. “You saw it.” 

Hickey pursed his mouth. He shook his head and turned back to Sol’s palm. _NOT RIGHT AWAY_ , he wrote. 

“Not right — ”

_TIME FOR JUST ONE._

Hickey let go of his hand, indicating that was going to be all he wanted to say. 

It went through all the slow, faulty clockwork of Sol’s brain. It developed like a daguerrotype photograph and dawned on him like the shred of rotting light at noonday during the arctic winter. 

“Did you give it conditions?” Suddenly he found he was shaking wildly. “Can — ” He could hardly say it. “Will we, can we ever die? Can we die?” 

Hickey shrugged. He shook his head. God, that there was some humility about him now killed Sol, it straight killed him, it was like a knife through the heart, but also it made something about him race, hard and fast. 

“Jesus,” Sol said. “Holy god.” 

His mind, being so full of holes, could not contain even the barest drop of this. It all went racing through him and later he thought he remembered screaming into the woods. Finally he managed, “How long have you known?” 

Hickey made a gesture encompassing the state of the two of them. _Look at us_. 

“Jesus Christ,” said Sol again. “It’s over. We’ve lost. We’re not going home again. I just want the pain to end. Don’t you?” 

What would Hickey’s witty retort to this have been if he could speak? He had never intended to go home again. 

“Will you tell me something,” Sol asked. 

Hickey looked up. He looked right into Sol’s eyes like they were the only thing it had ever hurt him to see. 

“What’s your name?” 

He started, like he’d heard a gunshot. Sharp intake of breath through the long, strange nose. 

“I think you owe that to me, don’t you?” 

Hickey pursed his mouth so tightly the blue-white lips disappeared into his face, and then he looked away. In the firelit darkness his hair was limp and sallow. At last he shook his head. 

“You don’t think — ” 

He shook his head harder, as though he were trying to shake something away from himself, and then he made a sound that Sol had not heard before, and perhaps he himself had not heard it before, because it looked like it surprised him — a sound like a dog being kicked. Like a yelp of shame. He clapped his good hand over his mouth and looked toward the sky and Sol saw, with complete horror, complete rapture, complete love, that his eyes were wet, and he understood. 

“You don’t remember.” 

For a moment Sol saw the pale, wrinkled, struggling little soul behind all the masks and elaborate costuming. This place had stripped them raw. The wind in the barrenlands would blow away everything that wasn't tied down. Hickey folded over on himself, like some burned-out facade collapsing under the weight of all the nothing inside it, and Sol embraced him. Hickey wasn’t so restless now as he had been then, when you could only ignore that he was miserable being held if you really loved him. He made the kicked dog sound again and Sol stroked his brittle hair. Above them the sky bled its deepest violet into the shadows of the woods. “I can’t do this,” Sol whispered, his broken lips brushing Hickey’s ear, “I can’t. Not alone. I need you back.” 

\--

Years later, when Sol had healed enough to be mistaken for a normal man, a fur trader, so he told people, he would retrace the route he and Hickey had walked years previous back up into the Arctic Circle to hunt caribou, seal, wolves, and bears. He sold and traded some meat and pelts to voyageurs and Inuit along the way and cured the rest to keep them warm and fed through the winter in the shelter where they lived then on the Great Bear Lake. More than once, near the mouth of the Back River, or on the mainland shore of Queen Maud Gulf, he found things — scraps of clothing, shards of fine blue willow ceramic, bones. On one memorable occasion, an overturned sledge, a collapsed tent full of decomposing bodies, no longer identifiable by their shrunken faces nor their sun- and wind-bleached uniforms. 

The further you walked north, the old world faded out, and another world faded in. The color went out of everything. There was a something living in the great silence. Now that Sol understood himself, there was nothing left to fear. Not death, the incorrigible scavenger which dogged men’s every footfall in this place. Not the cold, nor the great white bears, which he saw sometimes at the edge of his camp and chased off like they were stray dogs. Not the Inuit people, who left him well enough alone, though sometimes they would raise a hand to him in greeting across the barrens. The days were so long that his shadow hardly moved. He hauled the meat and furs on the sledge behind him with his rifle and harpoons and watched the horizon, looking to his compass until he found the ice. 

He saw the captain only once more. It was the end of the season and all day he had been pulling the sledge, laden with provisions for the winter, westerly toward home, following in the indistinct track of some other traveler. He remembered with some embarrassment the days when the tundra had seemed to him like a barren maze — like a sheet of blank parchment. With practice, you learned to read what was written all over it. The golden twilight seared a strange hue across the waves of shale. At last he came to the lip of a rise and saw a lone figure in furs knelt at the base of a high cairn, like the one they had passed years previous at Victory Point, still, as though in prayer. 

The wind brought the words back to him, the sound of English, which he had not heard now for many years except from his own lips, and Crozier’s voice, which he had not heard in about as long: 

“ — didn’t think I could ever miss anything so much. I don’t miss England — you probably could’ve guessed that. I don't know if I remember — _home_ , anymore. I suppose you forget what you want to forget, eh, James?” 

Sol’s gut twisted and wrung with an old, sympathetic pain.

“Sometimes I suppose the man that failed so miserably is dead. Unfortunately I still have… all of his memories. You know, you were the last person to call me Francis. I don’t think anybody else should say that name again. I am quite certain you would hate it here with me but it doesn’t stop me from, from thinking on it, I suppose, often, more often, likely, than I should, but no matter.” 

It was an old hunger, Sol figured. An old wishing. What selfsame feeling had put every one of them on those ships? He had had a great deal of time to think about it, but he found he could not quite give it a name. 

“I miss you,” he heard the captain say, laying a sealskin mitt at the head of the cairn. “Dear god, James, I miss you, I miss you…” 

When at last Crozier looked up, Sol raised a hand to him. They watched each other across the great expanse, the wind lifting furs, shifting stones, the wind picking up everything that was not fixed, and at last turned their separate ways for home. 

\---

\--

-

_Excerpt from “In Search of a Doomed Expedition,” by Lara Smith, New York Times Magazine Travel Issue, May 2016_

In the early morning, before anyone else is awake, two deckhands are amidships on the Bergmann, drinking hot coffee and eating the egg sandwiches whipped up in the galley for the crew. I’ve seen them around the ship before — they are rather hard to miss, seeing as Sal Taft, 30, interprets sign language for his friend Win Chambers, 27, who is not deaf, about which I made several embarrassing mistakes at first, but rather mute, because of a childhood accident, which seemed to me appropriately opaque and Victorian for the manner of quest we’re on — but haven’t yet found time to speak with them directly. Taft is tall, broad, with a craggy, worried face, wild hair brightened with early gray, and a limey British accent; Chambers is a squirrely redhead, petite and sharp, with lovely light eyes that scan the ice like an action movie. This is Taft’s third mission with the crew of the Bergmann and Chambers’ second, though they have worked together in the northwest passages for many years. In the manner of deckhands who have sailed together a long time, they share an uncanny confidence. To wit, when I ask Taft why I’ve seen him signing back at Chambers, who can hear, he tells me, in all seriousness, “Well, sometimes I don’t want to be overheard.” 

I ask why this — why the Bergmann, why the Franklin ships? I have it on good authority there’s a great deal more money to be made up here pursuing other seaborne industries: fishing, tourist expeditions. Taft interprets Chambers’ signs: “Any seaman who’s spent time in these waters has some kind of affinity or fixation for those ships and those men.” 

“Why do you think that is?” 

Chambers gestures with a flurry of signs. Taft, god help him, looks somewhat shocked, and I see him give Chambers a quick shake of the head. I wonder if there’s some superstition they’re trying to keep me away from so I don’t get spooked. “He says, It could just as easily have been us,” Taft tells me at last, rubbing the back of his sunburnt neck with a big, rough hand. Something tells me he’s lying — maybe it’s the lemon-look of Chambers’ face — but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why. 

With my own coffee, a few hours later, I think about speech. I wonder how Chambers, who seems to have a lot he wants to say, feels about the fact that Taft, at least to most people, controls his speech. I think about the signs I know in ASL, out of a friend’s ‘Baby Sign’ book — hello, goodbye, no, yes, I love you — and imagine a conversation consisting only of these words. I wonder if Chambers is lonely. I wonder if Taft ever feels burdened by his responsibility. 

My thoughts, as they are wont to do up here, turn to Franklin and his men. They left scant written records, and we will never hear them speak. The things they left behind — their signs —have been delegated to speak for them. I imagine a conversation consisting only of these words. Will it ever be enough?

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> hickey @ sol: ["i resent you for being raised right / i resent you for being tall / i resent you for never getting any opposition at all"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI1KfJTrixQ)
> 
> francis @ james's secret tomb: ["i'm trying to find my way home... i'm sorry... and i miss you"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuqEpjcBfaU)
> 
> this story owes a debt of gratitude and inspiration to [with the clamp on its jaws](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21446989) by saltstreets. 
> 
> i first read about the franklin expedition in [this article in the new york times magazine travel issue](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/20/magazine/franklin-expedition.html) in 2016. the last section of this story is basically an impression of that article (which i highly, highly, highly recommend you read!) within this version of the universe.


End file.
